Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Think Like an Ant When You Drive & Ways to Optimize Your Likability

Episode Date: September 18, 2021

How could using reusable grocery bags affect your body? f you take your own bags to the grocery store, there may be an unintended health consequence – and it’s not good. Listen as this episode begins by revealing what happens to some people who use reusable grocery bags. https://grist.org/food/are-your-reusable-grocery-bags-making-you-fat/ Every driver has a real impact on the flow of traffic according to Tom Vanderbilt, author of the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us (https://amzn.to/2XTgPDL). Tom joins me to explain why traffic flows the way it does, why it sometimes stops for no reason and how your driving affects other drivers. He also reveals what we can all do to make the traffic flow better. Do you know the best way to get ketchup out of the bottle? Everyone seems to have their own technique. However, the people at Heinz ketchup created a secret little way that works if you know what to look for. I’ll explain their method which actually works on any ketchup bottle. https://www.today.com/food/how-get-ketchup-out-bottle-trick-heinz-57-t118061 Some people are just more likable than others. And there are some simple strategies anyone can use to make themselves more likable. Michelle Tillis Lederman author of the book The 11 Laws of Likability (https://amzn.to/2LwUoxn) is here to explain what makes someone likable and how anyone can improve their likability. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Helix Sleep is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders AND two free pillows for our listeners at https://HelixSleep.com/SYSK Listen to Build For Tomorrow with Jason Feifer, our favorite new podcast, right here! https://apple.co/3rPM8La or visit https://www.jasonfeifer.com/build-for-tomorrow/ Omaha Steaks is the best! Get awesome pricing at https://OmahaSteaks.com/BMT T-Mobile for Business the leader in 5G, #1 in customer satisfaction, and a partner who includes benefits like 5G in every plan. Visit https://T-Mobile.com/business Discover matches all the cash back you earn on your credit card at the end of your first year automatically and is accepted at 99% of places in the U.S. that take credit cards! Learn more at https://discover.com/yes JUSTWORKS makes it easier for you to start, run and grow a business. Find out how by going to https://justworks.com https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Never try to beat a train across the tracks. Stop. Trains can’t. Paid for by NHTSA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's the most dangerous thing most of us do, driving. On the other hand, if you think about all those people out there, all the many millions of miles that are generated every year, I'm surprised there isn't more chaos and damage than there is. Also, the secret way to get ketchup out of the bottle every time. And if you want people to like you, you need to understand the laws of likability. One of my favorites is the law of energy. And this is the idea in the law states that energy is contagious.

What we give off is what we get back. We all have a mood. We're all kind of standing off a vibe. And what we don't think about is that it impacts everything. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests,

but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back.

And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. It does seem that more and more governments, local governments, maybe even state

governments, are requiring people to either bring their own grocery bags, reusable grocery bags, to the store, or pay a fee to get a new bag from the store. But could your grocery bags be making you fat? Scientists at Harvard discovered that people who brought their own reusable grocery bags were more likely to buy junk food compared to those who paid for and got a plastic bag at checkout. The theory is that using a reusable grocery bag makes people feel more virtuous, since

you know that you're helping the environment by choosing a bag that is not going to end up in a landfill. Consequently, you feel more entitled to reward yourself for your virtuous behavior by splurging on some junk food. The advice is to just be aware of the tendency to do this so maybe you'll be able to stop yourself from splurging and do keep using that reusable bag. It will eventually feel so routine that you won't feel the need to reward yourself. And that is something you should know. Ever since I got my driver's license many years ago, I have always loved to drive. And because I live in Southern California, which is legendary for having too many cars and too few roads and a lot of traffic jams,

I'm fascinated by how people drive and what causes traffic jams. I like to think I'm a good driver, but I suspect most people think they're a good driver. And there are also a lot of jerky drivers that go too fast and tailgate and zip in and out of lanes. Do those people think they're good drivers? Tom Vanderbilt has looked at a lot of the research about how people drive and how we could maybe drive a little better. He's the author of a book called Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us, and he joins me now. So why do we drive the way we do, Tom? Are we good drivers? That's a really good question. You look at the safety numbers on this, and we still have upwards of 30,000 people in the United States who die every year in

traffic fatalities. And this is a huge number. Of course, in the 1950s, when far fewer people were driving, that figure was closer to 50,000 people. So there has been progress. I would say, unfortunately, most of that progress has come about because of vehicles getting safer, not humans becoming better drivers. But I've always been struck there's two ways to look at this, that it's, as one paper once put it, it's the greatest contributor to mortality upon leaving your house, basically. I mean, it's the most dangerous thing most of us do, driving. On the other hand, if you think about all those people out there,

all the many millions of miles that are generated every year, I'm surprised there isn't more chaos and damage than there is. When I'm stuck in a traffic jam, and often when you get to the, whatever, the source of this traffic jam, and there was no cause, and so I'm thinking that there's just some people, there's some person that just doesn't know how to drive, and they're screwing up everything. Engineers have kind of called these phantom traffic jams, and they're usually not a phantom condition. It's just what's happened is that by the time we've arrived there, whatever precipitated this event has disappeared. Another way to think about this is that there's a wonderful animation on YouTube.

I can't think of the exact link, but it sort of models what happens during a traffic jam, and there's sort of a backwards propagating shockwave. So if you think about it, you're not driving into a traffic jam. The traffic jam is actually sort of rippling back into you. So you're kind of driving often when you see one of these things that you get there and what happened. It's because it already happened. It's gone. It's history. You're sort of driving into a historical traffic jam that has ended.

And that event might have been anything from a slight rise on the highway in elevation, which is particularly problematic for trucks. It could have been the sun setting at a particular angle, which causes people to, you know, not be able to see the road. Someone might have cut someone off while changing lanes. There could have been a piece of debris on the roadside or a cop that, you know, people saw. You make the interesting point in your book that ants don't get into traffic jams, and there's a lot of them on that ant highway. Why is that? You know, there's just this great flow that happens, and even when there's something like a bottleneck, ants just seem really good at self-organizing to

eliminate problems at those points. And the argument is that an ant colony is a completely cooperative system. No ant is really out for itself trying to get to the food source faster than another ant. They're all working for the queen, basically. But so they sort of self-generate these algorithms in a sense that you dictate how their flow works, how close they get to one another, the speed they're going. They can even sort of form bridges with their own bodies if there's a gap in the trail network. Just kind of utterly optimized to get the most traffic flow bang for the buck. And I should say this is what engineers would call sort of a socially optimal way.

They're trying to make overall traffic flow the best as possible as opposed to an individual optimality. And we can see that sometimes played out in the actual road traffic environment. If you take something like the idea of ramp metering, which as you know in California is a big thing, that's the traffic light at the end of an on-ramp onto the highway. You know, you sometimes get to the end of that, and there's a red light, and you look over at the highway, and you're thinking, well, traffic's flowing.

Why am I having to stop? And as one engineer explained it to me, you know, the traffic is flowing because we're asking you to stop. I mean, they sort of recognize that, you know, if you can just regulate that certain traffic holding up a few individuals, the whole thing will work better. So in some ways there are some winners and losers there. But the whole point is that when everyone is really out for themselves to optimize for their own best behavior, that might not translate to the best kind of traffic.

If everyone just tried to drive as fast as possible, always as close to the person in front of them, counterintuitively, in a way, that actually isn't the best for traffic, unlike with ants. But I wouldn't know, even if I wanted to be very altruistic and help the world get where they're going on time, what are the behaviors that would help the flow? Generally adhering to the speed limits, changing lanes as little as possible. You can see this in, police have even done experiments in some towns in Colorado on certain mountain passes where they were getting these traffic jams happening because of people essentially

driving into each other and causing these sort of shock waves. You'd have these police pace cars that would be driving, trying to pace traffic at about 55 miles an hour, which is sort of an optimal rate. It's been determined by engineers that that's around 55 is sort of the magic speed that gets the most cars down the highway at once. And this is what I began my whole book by discussing this question of late merging, when you have sort of two lanes that are turning into one because of a construction merger. And people often think it's better to get into the lane that's going to remain open immediately and don't get into that lane that's going to close. If you stay in

that lane, you're being rude. You know, it turned out when engineers actually looked into it, they could create a system that if people stayed in both lanes until the merge point and then did a one-on-one merge, it would actually be better for everyone. More traffic would get through that. But there's no way that we would know that. We sort of think of everyday life and view those other people as sort of cutting. They're cutting in line. We get angry. We might try to disrupt what they're doing, which only makes things worse in general. So again, it gets to that sort of socially optimal versus user optimal thing. We don't often know what would be best for the whole system, nor do we want to worry about that. We're

just trying to basically get home as fast as we can. So that's one of the great challenges here of trying to coordinate all these people at once on the road. I'm speaking with Tom Vanderbilt. We are talking about traffic and driving and all things related. And Tom is the author of a book called Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again.

And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type.

With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson,

discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Tom, are there places in the world where they do things differently? You know, England has their roundabouts instead of four-way stops, that actually work better or maybe work worse, but that maybe we could learn from? Absolutely. I mean, roundabouts is a perfect example that we have seen a real growth in

what's kind of called the modern or compact roundabout. This is not the giant traffic circle that, you know, Chevy Chase was in in some film vacation set in Paris, where you're sort of lost in this giant circle with ten lanes. These are these very, you know, small things that forces everyone to slow down as you enter an intersection. You eliminate this T-bone crash, which is a very dangerous crash. The problem with roundabouts is that you often get a lot of resistance because drivers think they're more dangerous, which in fact they are not.

What happens is they actually feel a little bit more dangerous because you have to make a more active set of decisions. You have to be more engaged as you go through that intersection. So, I mean, roundabouts really came from England and some countries in Scandinavia and have since been applied here in a larger way. I think one general problem I see with the U.S. is just that we're blessed with a lot of scale and size. So we've often, I think, overbuilt our road network, and we have these very large. Safety engineering stated that if you gave someone an 11-foot-wide lane, they had less chance to sort of drift into the next lane and hit someone. But those wider lanes also encourage people to simply drive faster, and then they kind of consume all the safety benefit that was engineered into that lane.

So often I think we have these sort of very dangerous environments that on these sort of suburban strips where you're driving 50 miles an hour, then all of a sudden you have to turn right into the Walmart. I mean, that's a very dangerous situation. And so kind of designing more livable streets, as they're called, where it's sort of better for all users. It's not going to work in every environment, but there's a whole host of things across the world. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is how parking fits into this discussion. You know, when people slow down to look for a parking place, or they stop traffic when they're trying to parallel park, does all of that add to the congestion problem?

Yeah, I mean, from the congestion point of view, parking is huge, because there's the question of, in a city like New York, what is parking going to be paid for? Is it going to be free? And Donald Shoup, who is at UCLA, has done some famous studies about quizzing people in certain neighborhoods and trying to estimate how much of the traffic flow was simply people looking for parking. And it's huge. The numbers are huge. And what they're was simply people looking for parking. And it's huge. The numbers are huge.

And what they're looking for generally is free parking. So the thought is if you just no longer make parking free and charge the rate that it probably should be charged for in a crowded city where real estate is expensive, that you could kind of eliminate a lot of this. And we've seen in Tokyo, you you, you can't own a car unless you can provide proof that you actually have a parking spot for it. So different places around the world have different ways of this, but parking is as essential as anything to driving. And it's, you know, all of our stops, all of our trips end and begin in a place and that there

needs to be a place for that car. So it's huge. Well, our frame of mind when we drive is so interesting to me because, you know, people get so angry when somebody cuts them off and thinks that the other guy is such a jerk. And yet when we cut somebody off, you know, we're not a jerk. We just made a mistake. But the things people do in road rage incidents, which, if you would take a breath and step back, is not that big a deal, and then guys end up going to jail over it. And being in New York, this is sort of the eye of the storm here. I mean, trying to get into something like the

Holland Tunnel, the entrance to New York, where something like 12 lanes have to get down to two and the amount of merging that has to happen there what you know i've never had it get personally violent but there's just a you know the sense of panic almost takes over where you really feel like you're all being squeezed yet you have to sort of get that few foot advantage over the person next to you to get in ahead to the tunnel ahead of them, which would save you precisely about one second, if that. So it's just this almost primal, I want to say, impulse that takes over. And again, just being in a car, a point I make a lot in the book, it just takes us a little bit out of the human equation where we're surrounded by this shell of anonymity and we're in a private space in public, so we sort of forget about human interaction and we do things that we might

not do off the road or not behind the wheel. I mean, people certainly might get in an argument over waiting in line at a place, but I don't think it happens at the same frequency as it happens on the road. Lastly, you mentioned that, you know, you're probably a more aware driver now from having studied all this. Knowing what you now know, what's the thing you do differently or that you would recommend the typical driver do differently to make things either easier, faster, safer, whatever, that maybe you didn't do before? One thing that I often try to just remind people of is, I mean, there's a lot of discussion of skill in driving,

and like, oh, if we could only train drivers better, you know, a lot of problems would be solved. And that's true to a point, but then people often don't really get what the skill in driving is. And it's not really these things, these high performance things we think about, about avoiding crashes or acting in high risk situations. Because studies have shown that when people are at, often people just make no reaction. You really don't have much time to think. and those are such fleeting events. But what driving really is, it's more sort of these larger abstract things about advanced planning, just studying the road conditions, knowing what's going to happen, anticipating what someone else is going to do, try to keep what other's, you know, what other people want to do

in mind, not just to focus on what you want to do. That's often the sense of this road rage is when we think the other person did something because they're a jerk, but they might have not seen you. They might have had to get over to get off at an exit. You know, there's kind of this rush to judgment. But if we could just sort of think of traffic as a cooperative social system that we all need to get where we're going safely at the end of the day, not this, you know, sort of zero-sum game of, you know, Darwinian struggle that, you know, the best drivers win, because often they don't.

You know, I think that would just sort of help things in general. So it's sort of just a humanistic plea here, I think, at the end of the day. Or maybe just be more like the ants. My guest has been Tom Vanderbilt. He's author of the book Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us. You can get a link to his book on Amazon in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Thanks for joining me, Tom. Thank you, Mike.

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They're fun to be around. They're easy to talk to, they make you feel good, and then there are people in your life who are, shall we say, less likable. But what makes somebody likable? How can you be more likable if that's something you'd like to be? Michelle Tillis Letterman has researched this topic. Michelle is a speaker, coach, and author of the book, The 11 Laws of Likeability. Hi, Michelle. So what is likeability? How do you define it? That's an interesting question. Likeability is the points of connection that we find in other people that make us say, yeah, I want to be around this person. I want to work with this

person. I want to be friends with this person. And although the things that we like about people can be different, right? What annoys one person, somebody else finds completely charming. Those drivers tend to be the same for all of us. And what are some of those drivers? There's three points in which we can impact likability. Before the conversation, during the conversation, and after. Before, it's about connecting to the real you and your authenticity. So it's your perception of yourself, how others perceive you, and most importantly in that before the conversation, it's your energy

and that vibe that you bring to an interaction. During the conversation, we have a lot of points of impact where we can show that we are listening, find those points of similarity, and leave them feeling good. And then after the conversation, the light touches familiarity and trying to add value to that connection. So are there things, traits, that people can exhibit that universally make you more likable? Authenticity.

And it's a broad answer, but the idea that you are projecting and bringing the real you to an interaction is universal. Now, it doesn't mean I'm going to like the real you, but I appreciate that I am interacting with the real you, because universally, people do not like that sense of somebody being fake. You don't know who it is, really. And so that is a universal turnoff. But usually when we meet somebody, aren't we kind of putting our best foot forward and putting our game face on and we're not the real me? I think we can bring a good energy to a situation in terms of that best foot forward and still bring the real you by asking questions and probing the conversation in a way that's interesting to you rather than what you think you should ask about or how you think you should respond. And so it's really following your natural interests and some self-disclosure. So sharing as well and creating a exchange, a back and forth.

Okay, what else? Well, the other thing you mentioned is something that's universal. And I think the smile. I mean, it's such a simple thing, but a smile is universally understood. No matter what language, what country, you can see a smile from almost 30 feet away. And that reduces misperceptions of how somebody might read your body language, friend or foe. The smile immediately is disarming and opens up and invites somebody in to an interaction. Why do you think it is that some people just seem to be so much more likable to so many more people than others? Why is it some people it's just such work and other people seem to be so, look at them, boy are they likable? You know, we all have natural communication preferences.

And the idea behind relationship networking is to pursue the relationships that are most interesting to us and that we want to pursue, and also to pursue them in a way that feels comfortable and natural for us. So there's a lot of perceptions out there of people who work the room and just are so great at networking. That's just one way to do it, and that's the way that's comfortable for them. It just happens to be a very visible way. There's a lot of ways to show your likability and make those connections that aren't quite as center of attention, but are still as effective. Like? If you're somebody who prefers the one-on-one, you might want to arrive to an event early where there's fewer people and you can have smaller conversations. You might

prefer actually staying at the end or even working the check-in counter so you can meet people in a way that you have something structured to converse about. So there's a lot of different ways in which you want to realize where you feel you're best. So these laws of likability that you have compiled, what would talk about those? Well, the first and the overarching law of likability is the law of authenticity. And as I said, it's the real you is the best you. You want to really stay connected to who you are. And if you're ever feeling that it's, real you is the best you. You want to really stay connected to who you are. And if you're ever feeling that it's, you know, this doesn't feel like me, you kind of want to recenter yourself so you can bring that real you. There's 11. Do you want me to go through all of

them? Well, let's go through some of them. Okay. One of my favorites is the law of energy. And this is the idea in the law states that energy is contagious. What we give off is what we get back. And it's one of the most difficult ones for people to grasp. We all have a mood. We're all kind of sending off a vibe. And what we don't think about because we are allowing that mood and that vibe to drive us is that it impacts everything.

If you're having a bad day, everything seems a bit harder. If you are dreading an interaction, that interaction is not going to go as well. If you can learn how to harness your energy and how to shift it into a genuine, more positive place where people are more attracted to being around you versus an energy that repels. And I'll tell you, I learned all this from experience. One of the jobs I had right after business school, I didn't want. I dreaded that first day, and I was oozing negative energy.

And literally, I remember one girl just stopped talking to me and walked away. And so, you know, 10 years later, you start to understand the impact of letting that energy drive you. One of my other favorite laws is the law of giving. And it's the idea of doing because you can and that giving creates value. And it isn't about what are you going to do for me and what's the reciprocity here, but it's give first. Give because you can. Give because it feels good.

And yeah, people might reciprocate and they might not, or they might do something and pay it forward. And by putting all of that value out there, you can really create strong networks. It seems fairly universal that the people who we find likable, or who I find likable, are positive, talk about positive things, as opposed to people who, you know, complain about everything and whine and talk about their ailments and their medications.

And those people, just kind of by the nature of what they say, it makes them less likable. I don't want to be around somebody who's going to whine and complain and talk about their ailments. It is sometimes hard to be around the negative Nelly. I absolutely hear that. And that kind of goes to that law of energy that we spoke about. If you're feeling in that place, that's rather negative, you know what, I'm not going to tell you to paint on a happy face because that's not real and that's not authentic. You want to find a way to tap into a natural way to shift. And in the book, we talk about different exercises that you can do to help shift your energy. But sometimes you just need to remove

yourself from the situation. You know that the energy you're bringing somewhere isn't effective for that moment, that person, that interaction. So remove yourself if it's at all possible. And that way you can be where you need to be in terms of your mood, but you're not having an impact long-term on the relationships or a business connection. Now, if you don't have a choice and you have to be in that situation, you need to try to find the thing that you can appreciate or enjoy about the person or the situation. Sometimes it might just be that there's a really good open bar or you know that there's one person that you can connect with at that conference and you're really looking forward to seeing them. And focus on that thing that makes you feel good rather than focusing on the things that you dread.

Because that shift in focus will help shift the energy, even if it's only slight, to bring a better energy that's going to be better for the situation. At this risk of being provocative, I mean, isn't the trying to be likable kind of automatically making you not authentic? I mean, if this has to be an effort, then it's not really you. That is not provocative at all, and actually it's a point that I make in the book. I don't want you to try to be likable. I don't think you can get everybody to like you, and that's not the goal. It's to understand how your behavior impacts your likability, and to think about some general

shifts in how we approach life and people in general. So I'm completely in agreement with you. We can be more effective at listening. We can tap into natural curiosity. We can think about how we can help others. It's an approach rather than, I'm doing this so you'll like me. That's certainly not the approach I want you to take, I agree. Is the goal to be just a likable person so people are attracted to you or is the goal to make yourself

more likable to the people you want to connect with or both? I think the goal is to build a network that you enjoy interacting with because you build a network of people that you really enjoy connecting with, that's a network that's going to last and sustain and support. And so some of those people are ones that you think would be good for your professional circle, and some are just your neighbors that you just happen to really get along with. And you just never know. And so when you focus on those true connections and still allow for the ones that might not be instantaneous to develop over time,

we don't want to throw any possibilities out, you know, out the window. But we also don't want to force them. And so don't over pursue because you think you should. Because you know what? Every connection is a good connection. What is it that that guy at the office that everybody likes, or that neighbor down the street that everybody likes? I mean, we all know who those people are. What is it that they have that the rest of us perhaps don't have or haven't developed yet? You know, some people do have a more joy of interacting with others. People who like people tend to be more likable. Now, that's just maybe a natural preference that some people have.

You know, we can talk about extroverts versus introverts, but I think introverts have a huge amount of skill in networking that might not get, you know, fair recognition, whereas the extroverts who are a little bit more gregarious and outgoing and we see that everybody likes them tend to get a little bit more recognition. So I think they give themselves more opportunities to make those connections and they get out there more, whereas the introvert, I think, has the strength in listening and building deeper connections. But you mentioned the word gregarious, and typically those people are gregarious.

They're more open and they're funnier and they're bigger personality-wise than a lot of people. Is that an ingredient to being likable? No, not at all. I would actually say that sometimes those that are quiet are more likable because they're not challenging those that are with those big personalities. So that's that old saying that opposites attract. We like people who are complimentary to us often, and it cracks me up because I notice this all the time. we often dislike people most similar to us because they challenge us or we see the things in them that we don't like in ourselves. And so we could be annoyed by that person who's too big and too bold, realizing that, oh God, are we like that too?

Lastly, since you say it's the number one and most important thing to be authentic, I think a lot of people hear that and go, what in the world does that mean? What does it mean to be authentic? I am who I am. Exactly. And if you can feel comfortable in that situation where you're being you, then you don't have to worry about it. But if you ever get that feeling where you're like,

this isn't me, this isn't real, I feel really awkward or uncomfortable, you have to question whether it's because you're trying to put on a happy face or you're trying to fake something, or is it just a situation or circumstances that you don't love? If it's the former, then you kind of need to tap in and say, well, why am I pretending to be somebody I'm not, or why am I trying to, you know, schmooze when that's not my style? Because it's a should. But when you are being your authentic self, you're not going to have those moments.

If you're uncomfortable because it's the situation, then maybe we're just stretching ourselves. And then I would encourage you to continue to stretch yourselves in trying new things. And you can take small steps. So you have to figure out what it is that's making you feel that this is not, you know, working for you. And then determine if it's just more that it's a personal challenge or that you're putting on or acting like somebody else. And really, really lastly, so understanding the theory behind what you're saying. So if I'm in a situation, what are the kinds of things I can do in interacting with other

people? You mentioned smiling and that kind of thing, but what, like that, but different, what are the kinds of things that are sort of universally will pull people in? Ask them questions. Get to know them. People love to talk about themselves. And when you ask questions from that place of curiosity, what do you really want to know about them? I'm not saying you can't use the, well, what do you do question, but then you want to probe a little bit deeper, ask open-ended questions that require somebody to start talking and then follow that conversation, sprinkle in a little self-disclosure and see what commonalities you might discover between you. And then after those initial conversations, follow up. Think about what it is you talked about, and maybe you'll send them an article

on the topic, or maybe you'll just connect to them on a social network. So stay in their mind. I always say, be in their circle, not in their face. You know what it sounds like is maybe sometimes we just try too hard to be likable, and maybe just being who we are and being curious about other people is really what it's all about. Michelle Tillis Letterman has been my guest. Her book is The 11 Laws of Likeability. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. There is a trick to getting ketchup out of the bottle when it doesn't seem to want to come out. But first of all, before I tell you what the secret is,

you must know that this only applies to Heinz ketchup, which is the best-selling and, according to many people, the best-tasting ketchup there is. But once you know the trick, you can apply it to any standard ketchup bottle. According to the Heinz people, there is a sweet spot on the standard glass bottle that you tap on in order to get the ketchup out. If you look at the Heinz bottle, there is an embossed 57 on the neck. Not on the label, it's actually embossed right into the glass. All you need to do is apply a firm tap right there on the 57, and the ketchup will come out easier. That little 57 embossed on the side of every Heinz ketchup bottle

was strategically placed there for this exact purpose. And that is something you should know. That's the podcast today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law,

her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.